The Education of Yohanne Kidolezi

By Matt Jennings
Photographs by Kathleen Dooher

Kintinku, Tanzania
The scrap of paper wasn’t much bigger than a business card.

It was after eight p.m. when Yohanne entered the house, and he was exhausted from a 12-hour day working the fields — rice and corn in the morning, bean and peanut in the afternoon, then back to rice in the evening. All he wanted to do was relax, maybe hang out with some friends, before turning in for the night.

His mother greeted him at the door. “This came from the railroad station for you,” she said and handed him that small scrap of paper.

Yohanne read what was written — who wrote this, he thought, the spelling is all off — then returned his mother’s puzzled look.

“I have no idea what this means,” he said. “United World College? What’s that? Interview? For what?”

“Maybe it’s important,” his mother replied.

Yohanne said nothing.

“You must go.”

To Yohanne, this notion was laughable. Set aside the fact that it was Saturday night and Dar Es Salaam was a two-day journey by train and bus; to get there by Tuesday, he’d have to leave the next morning. Set aside the fact that he’d miss five days of work, work that meant putting food on his family’s table. Set aside the fact that he didn’t know where he was supposed to go in his country’s capital city — a teeming metropolis he had never visited — much less why he was supposed to go in the first place. No, Yohanne thought, settling on the most practical reason. I can’t possibly go. We can’t afford it.

A round-trip train and bus ticket to Dar Es Salaam would cost at least five U.S. dollars, far more money than Yohanne or his mother had, so he left it at that. “I’ll be back shortly,” he told his mother, and went out into the night to find a friend so he could share this bizarre tale of a cryptic message that spoke of a far away city, a world college, and an interview.

When he came home an hour or so later, Yohanne was ready to put it all behind him, but again his mother met him at the door.

“Here,” she said, holding out her hand. Only this time she held not a scrap of paper, but the equivalent of five U.S. dollars. While Yohanne was out, she’d gone from door to door in their rural farming community of 1,000 people and borrowed the money her son would need to travel to Dar Es Salaam.

“Maybe it’s important.”

Do you remember that old childhood game where a group of kids sit in a circle and a sentence is whispered from one to the next? The point of the game comes when the sentence or phrase gets back to the originator, and it is never even close to what was said first. Well, that, in a sense, was the story behind the scrap of paper.

Unbeknownst to Yohanne or his mother, Yohanne had scored very well on the nationwide secondary school board exam, and this score had been reported to the country’s ministry of education. The high score had caught the attention of a volunteer national committee that was charged with recruiting Tanzanian students for the United World Colleges, a consortium of 12 international schools on five continents that teach the two-year, college-preparatory International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. The Tanzanian committee sent a letter to Yohanne’s school, requesting that he come to Dar Es Salaam to interview for a scholarship to the United World Colleges. By the time the letter arrived, though, Yohanne had graduated and returned to Kintinku, and the only address the school had was the address for his father, who was separated from his mother and living in the city of Mwanza. By the time his father received the forwarded letter, it was less than a week until the interview — and there was no way to get the letter to Yohanne.

Kintinku is a rural community in the heart of Tanzania. Most homes (including Yohanne’s) do not have running water or electricity, and the village does not have a post office or phone service. The only contact with the outside world is a train that comes through the region three times a week.

Desperate, Yohanne’s father went to the train station in Mwanza and asked the stationmaster to put the letter on a train and have it delivered to Kintinku. I cannot do it, a brusque stationmaster told Yohanne’s father, but after much pleading, this man with his son’s future in his hands convinced the station master to teletype the message to the station in Kintinku. But again, he was stymied. The primitive teletype machine in Kintinku was incompatible to receive a message from Mwanza. By now, the stationmaster, who had at first resisted the request, had come full circle; convinced by the father, it was as if he, too, was invested in the future of a farm boy from Kintinku. So he called a friend who worked at a train station halfway between Mwanza and Kintinku; that station, he learned, had the same teletype machine as the one in Kintinku.

So the letter was read over the phone to someone halfway between Mwanza and Kintinku, then written in shorthand on a notepad, and finally teletyped to the station in Kintinku, where the stationmaster scribbled out the only words he could decipher on a scrap of paper not much bigger than a business card, and handed it to a young boy who ran it out to the Kidolezi house.

The next morning at eight o’clock, Yohanne Kidolezi—wearing a tee shirt and the only dress pants and shoes he owned and carrying a short-sleeve green shirt with a pair of pockets on the front—boarded a train bound for Dar Es Salaam.

Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
It was dark when the last passenger got off the sweltering bus, but Yohanne remained in his sticky vinyl seat, the same seat he had occupied for nearly a day’s journey. After half a day on the train, he had switched to a bus for the remainder of the trip to Dar Es Salaam, a relatively uneventful journey, until the bus became mired in traffic on the outskirts of the city and sat, motionless, for more than an hour.

Many of the passengers had gotten frustrated and hopped off early, opting to improvise their final leg home, but Yohanne had no choice but to remain where he was, in his seat, until the bus pulled into the station. The friendly stationmaster in his home village had given him the name of a cousin whom he could stay with while in Dar Es Salaam, but the detailed directions to the man’s house commenced with the bus station in the city, not from a highway somewhere on its outskirts. So Yohanne sat as the minutes ticked by; finally, the driver himself stood up, muttered that Yohanne was on his own, and abandoned the bus in the middle of the congested highway.

So Yohanne, who had never before visited Dar Es Salaam, stepped off the bus and onto the highway’s shoulder and began walking toward the lights of the city, more terrified than he had ever been before.

After several hours, he had reached the city center and was directed to the bus station, where he began following the directions to the house where he would spend the night. It was after midnight when he arrived, soaked with sweat and nearly in tears. Before going to sleep, he told his new friend, “I still don’t know where I’m going tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry,” the Kintinku stationmaster’s cousin replied, We’ll figure that out tomorrow.”

By the time Yohanne awoke the next morning, the cousin had called the ministry of education and learned that the British consulate was conducting interviews for a scholarship program. So off Yohanne went, still with no idea what he was heading toward.

After arriving at the consulate and learning that he was, indeed, in the right place, Yohanne was ushered into a vast library, where he read all the literature he could get his hands on about UWC. He waited for about 30 minutes, before being summoned to an office where four people — two Tanzanians, two British — sat behind a long table. And they began to speak, in English.

Now, Yohanne didn’t speak English, only Swahili, but he had studied the language in school and understood it fairly well (he had just never spoken it before), and he figured he had come too far and at too great a cost to just throw up his hands and walk out. So for more than an hour, he did the best he could, explaining what he could contribute to the United World College (“I’d share my experiences as a Tanzanian”), and what education meant to him (“opportunity”), before the interview ended with a question that almost caused Yohanne to laugh.

“Here’s the big question, Yohanne. How would you cope being away from home at one of the United World Colleges?”

And Yohanne took a deep breath and explained all that had transpired during the past 48 hours.

“I wouldn’t be the only one there who didn’t know what to do, who might be afraid,” he concluded. “I’d learn from them, and they would learn from me.”

And then everyone in the room stood, and the four adults shook Yohanne’s hand. One of the people behind the table told Yohanne that they’d let him know how the scholarship search turned out, but in his mind, he was halfway back to Kintinku. Whatever, he thought. I need to get back home. My mother needs me.

Within a few hours, Yohanne was back on a bus headed toward home. About six hours into the trip, the bus stopped to refuel in a town called Dodoma, and Yohanne stepped off to stretch his legs. He was walking toward the depot when a man approached and asked if he was Yohanne Kidolezi.

Wary of strangers, Yohanne said no and kept on walking.

“Well, do you know who he might be?” the man shouted after him. “He’s needed in Dar Es Salaam.”

Yohanne stopped and turned around.

“Why?” he asked.

“He’s been awarded a scholarship,” the man said, “and I’ve been sent to find him.”

Haugland, Norway
The United World College in Norway — Red Cross Nordic United World College — is nestled along the shores of the Flekke Fjord in the small community of Haugland on the country’s western coast. To reach the secluded hamlet, one must hop aboard a high-speed passenger ferry in Bergen, 150 kilometers to the south, and shoot up the Norwegian coastline, then skip across the Sogn Fjord, the longest and deepest fjord in Norway, before arriving at a dock in a harbor town called Rysjedalsvika. A short bus ride takes passengers to the village of Flekke, where they then have the option of walking or taking a taxi the final three kilometers to Haugland and the UWC campus.

Along the shoreline, lush patches of green forest break up the dull gray of the water, rocks, and sky, while tidy houses dot the surrounding hillside. In Haugland, the campus is tucked away at the base of a towering cliff; reflections of the college’s brightly colored buildings shimmer on the mirror-like surface of the tiny Flekke Fjord.

For Yohanne, arriving in Norway in the fall of 1998 was akin to landing on the surface of another planet. Just a few months prior, he had never been to his country’s capital city. Yet here he was in Scandinavia, the first in his family to ever travel beyond the border of Tanzania. He would later recall the first year at UWC as a bombardment of the senses—“My name is Yohanne, I am from Tanzania,” was all he could say at first—but gradually, just trying to get by gave way to greater acclimation (I wouldn’t be the only one there who didn’t know what to do, who might be afraid…I’d learn from them, and they would learn from me). By his second year, he started to think about his future, and it dawned on him that he’d have the opportunity to go to college.

Around that time, Mike Schoenfeld ’73, then Middlebury’s dean for enrollment planning, was visiting UWC campuses around the world, interviewing candidates for a fledgling scholarship program. That fall, Shelby Davis, an American businessman and philanthropist, had initiated a scholarship to provide need-based financial aid to any UWC graduate accepted by one of five American colleges and universities. Middlebury, which Davis’s son attended, was one of the five, and Schoenfeld was charged with finding qualified scholarship candidates.

Schoenfeld had been in Norway interviewing candidates all day when Yohanne, who was then known as Kido (a nickname he picked up during his first year at UWC), entered the study, and for a few minutes they sized each other up, this teenager from Tanzania and this enthusiastic college administrator from Vermont. (“He showed up with this accent,” Kido would later recall with a laugh, “and he kept emphasizing the size of Middlebury, which I didn’t understand at the time.”) The two hit it off—Schoenfeld would say that interviewing the UWC kids is simultaneously stimulating and humbling—and after about 20 minutes, Kido’s inquisitiveness, his life story, his infectious joy had won over the admissions officer from New England.

That spring, Kido was admitted to Middlebury, and with a Davis Scholarship meeting his full need of 100 percent grant aid, he was off to Vermont the following February.

Middlebury, Vermont
Kido arrived at Middlebury in February of 2001, one of 12 Davis Scholars to come to campus that year. (The Davis Scholarship program has since expanded from the original five to 76 colleges and universities, providing more than 1,100 UWC graduates with need-based aid; in 2006, 99 Davis Scholars from 67 countries were Middlebury students.) It was cold, he would later recall, colder than Norway, and when he first rode into town, Kido was stunned by its size. Though he had grown up in a small village and attended UWC in a tiny, rural hamlet, he expected Middlebury, being in America, to be bigger. (“When I flew into Boston on my way to Middlebury,” he would later say, “I thought the city I saw from my airplane window was Middlebury.”)

No matter, he thought. He was brimming with confidence and threw himself into the life of an American college. By the end of his first-year, he had founded a singing group,
Mchakamchaka, that would jog around town singing Swahili folk songs; become active with the International Student Organization, and bonded with classmates, including his roommate from Appleton, Maine, who, inspired by Kido, would go on to become a Watson fellow.

Kido was unable to return home during the summers — a plane ticket was out of the question, so he worked in the library — but a phone call in the spring of 2003 changed that.

“Mother is sick, you need to come home.”

It was his brother, calling from Tanzania.

All semester, Kido sensed that something wasn’t right back home—his mother had been sick for more than a year, but kept the severity of her illness from her son because she didn’t want his worrying to interfere with his studies. It wasn’t until his brother called that he realized how dire the situation was.

Kido returned to Kintinku.

Four days later, his mother died.

After her death, Kido was unsure if he should return to Middlebury. What would become of his home? Of his farm? Could his siblings—some older, some younger—get along without him now that their mother was gone? “But my mother would have been so disappointed if I had stayed,” he would later say—You must go—“and I realized that I had to go back.”

He returned to Middlebury in the fall of 2003, only to travel back to Tanzania the following summer. This time, though, his mother would have been far from disappointed in her son’s choice.

Lake Victoria, Tanzania
In Tanzania, as in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, child labor is a rampant problem, where children as young as four are forced into back-breaking, grueling work, often twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. In these cases, school, obviously, is never presented as an option. (“Ask a six-year-old if they like it, and they can’t even tell you,” Kido will say. “It’s what they know.”)

Aware that without extraordinary circumstances — parents who valued education above all else and a tiny scrap of paper — inspired by a Middlebury economics class, Kido applied for and subsequently received a research grant through the College’s Rohatyn Center for International Affairs. That grant took him to Lake Victoria, where he spent three months interviewing children — varying in age from four to sixteen, forced to grow up well before their time — about what they do, where they slept, what they ate. Though skeptical at first, the children gradually opened up with Kido—because he spoke Swahili, because he was older and in Tanzanians are taught to respect their elders, and because he asked questions that they could understand (what do you do, not why do you do it).

He returned to Middlebury with binders full of data and a central critique of the study of child labor in places like Tanzania. Almost all the child labor surveys conducted today, Kido’s thesis claimed, are household surveys, where those queried are the heads of households. Child labor isn’t new, but the approach to studying the issue is severely flawed, Kido challenged. Rather than interviewing those who are forcing the children into labor — the very people who would be motivated to lie about the work being done — Kido made the case to talk to the people who are actually doing the work. Though the approach may seem intuitive, in Tanzania it breaks cultural barriers. And it illuminates a problem far more severe than originally thought.

On the strength of his thesis, Kido graduated with honors from Middlebury in the spring of 2005. Attending the commencement ceremony was his father, traveling to the United States — indeed, beyond the borders of Tanzania — for the first time.

This spring, Kido learned that the African Journal Review had accepted his thesis for publication.

Boston, Massachusetts
Yohanne “Kido” Kidolezi tucks into a bowl of clam chowder.

He’s eating dinner at the Top of the Hub, a bustling restaurant on the 52nd floor of the main tower in Boston’s Prudential Center. For the past few hours, he’s been telling a visitor his life story.

With floor-to-ceiling windows offering a 360-degree panorama of the metropolis, the restaurant affords the best views in the city. It’s twilight on a clear summer evening; sailboats dot the Charles, while off to the east, airplanes take off and land at Logan.

He smiles.

“My father couldn’t believe that this is where I worked,” he says of his offices over in the Prudential’s south tower.

Before his father returned to Tanzania in 2005, Kido brought him down to Boston to see the city where his son would be living. They walked through Quincy Market and Boston Common, scouted apartments for Kido, and toured the offices of the Analysis Group, a consulting group that provides economic analysis for law firms and corporations, where Kido would begin work that summer.

Kido is still with the Analysis Group, though he’s entertaining ideas of going to business school. After that, he says, he’ll eventually return home.

“Anything I do would have such a larger impact there than here,” he explains.

He wants to reform the educationional system in Tanzania, and he says that he thinks often of the 300 children he interviewed that summer at Lake Victoria. “Going home and seeing those kids and knowing that this didn’t have to be their life...”

He looks out the window. In the distance, a plane takes off from Logan.